Negotiate and Haggle in English

Practice makes perfect, so let your beginners practice and practice and practice some more. In our English Dialogue Building Blocks activities, we dissect some basic dialogues in useful contexts to help your students feel more comfortable with the (real life) basics. In pairs, students will use the fragments of larger dialogues to create their own, giving them the chance to see and repeat useful phrases and keywords in order to integrate them into their speech. Use this one to discover how to negotiate and haggle in English with your A1-A2 ESL students, or practice and review haggling and negotiating with your B1 students.

Here’s how it works:

Building Blocks: This activity is designed for your A1/A2 learners. You will see a framed starting sentence in the middle and scrambled sentences around it. Your learners must try to reconstruct a dialogue starting from the framed sentences. There are, of course, multiple possibilities for dialogues. You can have your students work in pairs. To liven up the class, you can also give additional instructions, such as creating the longest or most original dialogue. PLEASE NOTE that it is generally impossible to use all the sentences in a single dialogue. Students can use the checkboxes if working online to keep track of which fragments they’ve already used. You could gamify the activity even further by comparing how many checkboxes each pair was able to use, keeping in mind a fragment that has been marked cannot be used twice (to keep it simple and to let your students repeat and practice, ignore the checkboxes).

For example:

A: How much is this?

B: For you? Twelve euros.

A: That’s way too much!

B: How about eight?

A: Six.

B: It’s a deal.

Role-Play Scenarios: Use the images on page 2 to set up a buyer/seller relationship in pairs. Choose one of the two role-play scenarios presented or come up with your own.

Something related?

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